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California gasoline prices soaring to highest levels ever

This Calabasas gas station is an outlier but average California gasoline prices are soon expected to break the all time California high of $4.61 a gallon. The Daily News in the San Fernando Valley explains.

A refinery closure, a contaminated pipeline and the state’s strict pollution limits are all, in part, to blame, experts said. Gasoline inventories across the state are lower than they have been in more than 10 years.

Strict pollution laws in the middle of a recession when other states don’t have them is, in my opinion, self-defeating. Oddly, prices are about 20 cents a gallon less here in San Jose than in the San Fernando Valley where we used to live (and yes, I’ve been to that Calabasas gas station.)

The price spike is of course being exploited and manipulated by the usual band of amoral futures traders while government regulators pretend to be asleep. California gasoline prices are than elsewhere normally because anti-pollution regulations mandate special fuel which is only made in a few refineries.